Biyi Bandele

Biography

Biyi Bandele was born in Nigeria in 1967, and now lives in London.

He has written several plays, and worked with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge from 2000-2002, and Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at Bush Theatre from 2002-2003.

His plays are: Rain; Marching for Fausa (1993); Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994); Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys (published in one volume, 1995). Brixton Stories, his stage adaptation of his own novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001, and was published in one volume with his play, Happy BirthdayMister Deka, which premiered in 1999.

Biyi Bandele has also written five novels: The Man Who Came In From the Back of Beyond (1991); The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (1991); The Street (1999); Burma Boy (2007): and The King's Rifle (2009).

In 1997 he adapted Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the stage, and in 1999 wrote a new adaptation of Aphra Benn’s Oroonoko, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.